


Se l'amore

by Measured



Category: Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-13
Updated: 2010-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-13 15:57:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured/pseuds/Measured
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He writes out into the ether, going through towns and lovers like a vagrant, always looking for a hint of that breathless happiness they knew for a few short days in Rome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Se l'amore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Age or Wizardry (ageorwizardry)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ageorwizardry/gifts).



> Con tutto il cuore ben trovato: with all my heart, I'm glad to see you  
> Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato signor mio [Elio]: You are welcome here, my most honored [Elio]
> 
> Both are from The Taming Of The Shrew, though the second is modified.

He writes. It is a logical occurrence, given his history. They have always thought him a writer, either academic or otherwise, but it is the way he held himself, his gift of words even at a young age that clued them in. Elio never focused on the before or after Elio. He never had grand aspirations, and writing itself was something he drifted into, without intent or reasoning. One moment he was feeling the ache in his chest, the name he says in his sleep and the captured essence of th He sits on cafes by the Reine, waiting for his agent's call. The reviews are good. He is called the definitive new gay and Jewish author, though such labels feel like an uncomfortable mantle.

He thinks _I have never been gay or straight, only yours._

He writes what is called novels, full of what people call all at once romantic, heartrending, owing perhaps, a debt of love to Proust, but no less original for that debt. He writes what they call fiction. He calls it memories, love letters with different names sent out to the world. Like a letter thrown in a bottle, it sails through the salty ocean, looking for another person to read.

Perhaps Oliver will see.

Perhaps he won't.

He writes out into the ether, going through towns and lovers like a vagrant, always looking for a hint of that breathless happiness they knew for a few short days in Rome.

*

He never keeps lovers long. For this month, it is a French boy named Etienne warming his bed. He's wiry and well read. He hides behind his thick glasses when he wants, posing as a mild-mannered college student. He is in fact, all teeth and nails when they fuck. He leaves marks for days in a careless graze of his teeth, his fingernails across Elio's back.

"If only you'd write that kind of poetry to me, no?" He sighs. He pushes his messy dark hair out of his eyes.

"You know I write only to my muse," Elio says without looking up from the inky, chaotic scrawl of words across the notepad.

"Somehow I think this muse more flesh and blood than you say," Etienne says. He drags Elio in, weaving those talented fingers in his thinning hair and bringing him in for a kiss.

"But maybe, just maybe I can distract you."

And when they fall to the bed, grinding and kissing, they both know this is just another diversion for both of them. Etienne will never call him _mon chéri_ out of pride, for he knows Elio will never return the gesture. It is his way. Elio makes a habit to never stay long enough for his lovers to fall in love.

*

He looks to the crowd and raises up his book, turning the pages with their heady ink scent rising up to him. It's different than the usual reading. Usually it is a large, commercial setting. Large bookstores, malls or academic places. Everything has the feel of plastic in these places, from plastic smiles to plastic words he must read off, ringing hollow, and tinny in these large quarters. The truth is this is just another symptom of the coma he lives in. Longing is not a disease, it is not one which can simply be prescribed away. And yet it eats away at the soul, piece by agonizing piece.

Today, however, it is in a small bookshop, one which reeks of San Clemente Syndrome. Every piece of wood that makes up the framework makes him remember that night. The taste of gin and the ripeness of youth rife with happiness so giddy as to be more potent than any drug.

He looks up to the listeners, his readers. He feels a push and pull, as if he has become seventeen again, on the cusp of adulthood, tasting his first love. He notices a familiar face in the background, seated by the door. Oliver has changed since he saw him last. It is still the same skin he had kissed and adored, found every freckle and memorized in one short space of time. There is grey in his beard, and at the sides of his temples. Age has made him wizened, has only caressed him gently in sunspots. When he looks out, it is not at the other people, but at him. It is only Oliver's eyes he meets. To any observer, it would seem only the wall he was focusing so intently, as if he were going above the sea of faces in a moment of shyness. He clears his throat and begins to read his novel aloud.

 _  
I remember you in the taste of peaches, the fuzz to my mouth, the same as I have touched at your stomach, weaving down to your core. I remember that kiss, tasting of morning coffee to treat the oncoming hangover that drained us. It was what they called youth, love, and for that moment we were happy in a jubilance neither thought possible._

And he reads it out, a love letter in dense prose. He does not stutter, his voice as clear and melodious as he has thought of – _hoped for_ in ceaseless moments between sheets where he wrote up all the pieces they would never have. Morning peaches, sliced clean in half with cottage cheese on them (an unspoken joke they still share); his fingers along the curving road of his spine, soon to be replaced by his tongue as he tastes the salt from every part of Oliver's body, as if so doing would reveal every last secret between them. He would move until his fingers were pressed inside Oliver, holding him at the same time. He'd watch him as he brought Oliver to climax, without a thought of his own desire for the moment, for everything was too focused on Oliver. Oliver's face in pleasure, the flush of approaching climax over his skin, the rise and fall of breath and little whimpers. Oliver has never been a loud lover. They have spent too much time in secret, too many stolen hours that he has been trained to bite his lips.

 _And here we are, in our breathless comas together, asleep face to face. I look to you through dreamscapes and miles and our hands reach out to the empty place in the bed where memories burn like embers against my skin._

When he finally at last finishes, the audience for a moment stands in a stupor, the still unbroken by applause. It is as if he has drawn them into the spell of dreaming with him. It is a slow waking, with groggy expressions and dizzy feelings, but they wake none the less, and the first applause sounds. He nods his head, acknowledging this, but his gaze does not stray from Oliver. Oliver here in the flesh. If he blinks, he might find it a mere hallucination, a mirage to the senses.

But he cannot stay like this. They come up, his readers and bring their copies to be signed. He signs with an elegant scrawl, and thinks of how he will have to wear the wrist splints tonight as the pain shoots up his arms.

Some time later, in what seems like centuries, but is only minutes, Oliver is the last before him. He takes the book almost reverently, and opens it not to the inside cover, but to an inner page where the inscription is. _To O. Cor Cordium._ Beside it, he writes simply _E._

" _Con tutto il cuore, ben trovato,_ may I say," Oliver says.

Without a beat, Elio answers. _Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato signor mio_ Oliver."

Oliver smiles. There's lines at the corner of his mouth. Laugh lines. He has had some happiness, enough to mark them. Elio wants to trace each and every one.

"I see you know your Shakespeare."

Elio nods.

"It seemed appropriate, though I've always been a little more fond of Twelfth Night."

And Elio thinks of them in Shakespearian terms: Antonio and Sebastian, Hamlet and Horatio. Or were they the starcrossed lovers, Ophelia and Hamlet destined to die apart, laid to rest in separate graves? And has he not played them in his mind a thousand times. He has thought _You are at once both Beatrice and Virgil to me._

He does not say the words that bubble up. His lovers have always complained for such a romantic writer, he is a terse, and hardly romantic. He has saved it all up for one, and that is Oliver. The beloved, the muse. But for too long he has used only love letters packaged askew to make a novel as his words. He thinks he can see the entire outline of his newest novel. Old friends in a bookshop, almost strangers and yet with the same taut connection to hold them beyond the awkward silences.

He says instead _Would you like to get something to drink?_

*

It's a coffee shop, not some seedy bar where they can slink into a corner and find a booth, where Elio's hands could explore in the dark, between belt and skin. They are at a respectable distance. Oliver is divorced. The sweetest words have never fallen so hollow before. Elio always imagined her dying, a tragic thing. In his grief, he finds Elio on a road in Rome. In that first sight they live and breathe for the first time in a long time. They wake from their sleepwalk of existence, their mutual comas. That was his second novel, a meditation on the lasting ability of love often compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's _Love In The Time Of Cholera._

"We were always on an edge, it seems," Oliver says.

There are a million questions in his mind. Enough to write two novels or more with. _Was their an affair, or simply the breaking down of the mundane in a slow death?_ But this is all Oliver says on this matter. Elio does not press him, and compromises internally to settling the affair in print, if not in real life. He wonders what Oliver told his wife. About the Before, about _them._ Did she even look for the ghost spots in Oliver's heart that Elio owned?

The rest is filled in, each piece of information volleyed between them as if it is a tennis match.

–Yes, his children are fine. One is getting married next Spring.

–Yes, Elio's life as a writer is fulfilling. Money has never been an issue to him, and the advances help keep it that way.

–Yes, Paris is lovely. (He does not mention Etienne whose days are already numbered. If Oliver has another lover, he does not offer up the information.)

–Yes, the new appointment of professor is challenging.

–Yes, it has been a long time. (He does not say _I missed you like a drowning man misses air._ )

(And what can he say of the past, which is all ghosts. His father, Anchaise, Mafalda, should Oliver ask of them, he will list graves and ghost spots where he sees the remaining haze of memories infused. In chopping blocks and chairs, places where the sun reaches and stretches like a sleepy cat. They are nothing but photos and memories of a past life, save for their transmuted appearances in his fiction.)

And so it goes, their mundane exchange of facts. To Elio it is sublime, the fragments of the past he has only recreated in fiction finally put to words. He brings the coffee to his lips and scalds them, and his tongue.

"Careful now," Oliver says. "You always did think too much." He seems at once nostalgic, mixed with sadness and happiness. Hasn't it always been like that for them? They are jubilation and longing, almost living and almost dying entwined together.

"What I've been thinking is that I could read you the rest of the story," Elio says, his voice a low murmur. He reaches out to Oliver, an open palm across the booth.

He can already see the first lines coalescing together of the next book: _I hold my hand out to you. I offer myself to you. Laid out, I have never been anyone's but yours through these years. I wait for your mouth to twist into a wry smile, for you to gaze back at me and call me by your name._


End file.
